Indonesia’s tour-de-force music duo Senyawa along with Melbourne’s choreographic luminaries Lucy Guerin and Gideon Obarzanek join forces with two of Australia’s leading dance companies, Dancenorth and Lucy Guerin Inc. who together take you on a trance-noise odyssey that transcends all borders, a unique ecstatic music/dance ritual for non-believers.

Senyawa’s performance reinterprets the Javanese tradition of entering trance through dance and music as a powerful secular present-day form. Their sound borrows from the metal bands they listened to as teenagers – Black Sabbath, Metallica, Iron Maiden – and Indonesian ritual and folk idioms. Their music and performance is influenced by forces in nature to take the audience into a transformative state outside of organised belief systems.

As the performance unfolds, Senyawa’s unique fusion of hand-made electrified stringed instruments with opera style and heavy metal voice slowly builds to a euphoric pitch. The exceptional dancers are propelled into wild physical abandonment and ecstatic release, that transmits to the audience as a visceral empathic experience. The demarcation between dancer and non-dancer, audience and performer and the professional and the amateur dissolves as the performance transitions into a large-scale dance event.